Rumours that Northern Rail’s passengers might have to endure thirty-year old four-wheeled bus-derived Pacers for a good few years yet may be ill-founded.

In an annoucement that that’s a superb example of what Neal Stephenson’s novel “Anathem” described as “Bullshytte, Rail Minister Andrew Jones is quoted in Rail,

“All Pacer vehicles on the Northern franchise will be withdrawn by 2020 due to incompatibility of the Pacer vehicles with the vision for economic growth and prosperity in the North, as per the announcement by the Secretary of State in February 2015.”

No doubt one or two of these almost universally unloved vehicles will be preserved. And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if their replacements turn out to be Vivarail’s D-Train, rebuilds of redundant London Underground District Line trains which are actually slighly older than the Pacers.

“There are thousands boarding these so-called ‘pacer’ trains. There is nothing pacy about them at all. They are cattle trucks on wheels”.

Known by some as “Nodding Donkeys” due to their pitching motion when travelling at any speed, these trains have passed their original 20-year design life by many years, and have been in service for longer than the worn-out Modernisation Plan DMUs they were built to replace.

Clegg claims southern commuters would never have stood for the things. Well, not in the south-east anyway. A few years back First Great Western needed extra rolling stock to ease overcrowding, and a handful of hand-me-down Pacers were the only trains available. They spent a couple of years in south Devon before FGW managed to get hold of some class 150 and 153 sprinters displaced from the West Midlands, and the Pacers were sent back to Northern Rail where they’re still running today.

Had First Great Western allocated them to the London end of their network and put them to work on the Thames branches, what on earth would the blue rinse types of Henley made of them?